Formulate, describe and implement a challenging and self-directed programme of

I started this course with a very ambitious project; I really wanted to challenge myself, thought of the drawing in a different level and to make a game seemed like a following step. From the beginning I focused on working with narratives, stories which are exploring ethical behaviour in public. Using my experiences as inspiration and tool for this project I wanted to elevate it further; I was questioning situations and myself ‘What I would do?’ and immediately started thinking of reciprocal actions, which could be working as ‘the moral of the story’.

I was intrigued by how often people face inappropriate situations and are unable to react or take an action right that moment. Given such circumstances I started collecting and building up stories, which initially were supposed to be presented in a form of interactive game, creating various options/responses to such incidents. I was very interested in human nature, therefore I started to look into ethics as my main subject matter. At every step I was questioning whether this or that situation is ethical or not, whether this incident is stereotypical or coincidental, ect. Following the question ‘What is appropriate and what is not?’ I picked few controversial situations and focused around them; how to visualize it, how to build a language only using imagery and without sound or text.

While primarily my focus was eventually to create a game I decided to work on narrativeand storyboards of ‘The streetwalker’ and others. That was followed by a research about mythologies, creating the myth and the meaning of the myth, which influenced me to concentrate on the stories on its own and to begin developing them individually. I was no longer interested in making a game as I set a new set of goals for my project: the importance of backgrounds and the drawing itself. Also, I started to understand that some of the actions can have no response to that and itself has ‘the moral of story’. So, the study became more focused around animation; materiality, frame rate and creating a language using objects. I was looking into how to build a world visually by visiting exhibitions and looking for artistsworking in animation and drawing. That helped me to understand their worlds and that meanings can be created by the way you stage the stories.

Critically engage with practice-based research and contribute actively to debate and

I have been actively working to meet my goals, but mostly I concentrated on animation; completed series of tests, experiments and made few finished works. It was not easy to meet all my expectations and follow my workplan – drawing animations took most of the time. Despite of constant ‘tight time’ feeling, I repeatedly made same animation episodes just in different material and frame rate.

In the beginning I wanted to make more realistic and detailed animation; my goal was to achieve more fluidity in the movement, have a more detailed drawing look, but remain simple. Moreover, I tried to push myself and move from repetitive simple one action to multiple actions animation; have a beginning, culmination and the end. As I played with first attempts to animate ‘The Streetwalker’ and after visiting Daniel Richer’s exhibition I realized that I need colours and I want backgrounds, becauselocation is very important. In ‘The Innocent Pee’ I tried to combine both location, colour and animated situation.

At some point I was losing motivation (or interest) and couldn’t stop thinking about drawing style, aesthetics, animating and building a narrative. I had to take another approach and work on side projects to experiment with different materials and methods. At every point, when each experiment was happening I learnt different techniques or discovered my methods which later I was able to adapt in my future tests/works of this ongoing project.

Making a world look like it came from a dream was challenging, although I was enjoying drawing and painting various objects and places. It was fun to experiment with watercolour and make a plant animation, which from a technical side was and is my biggest achievement.

Critically reflect upon your practice and articulate a clear understanding of

By documenting my practice this blog helped me to understand my processes and have a deeper thinking. I became more confident in reflecting my own work and it became easier to come up with conclusions or make decisions.

Somehow reflecting my own work can feel very personal, but it helped to notice details or something that never would have crossed my mind.

I shared my thoughts in a recent group crit session, which is a summary of what I have done during Unit 1.